Abandoned by Booklikes

I read this for "Murder Most Foul": The Narrows by Michael Connelly which is part of a murder mystery series (Harry Bosch).

A FBI agent named Rachel Walling is trying to track down a serial killer called The Poet. She ends up joining forces with LAPD detective Harry Bosch. 

I'm going to suggest that you just plug your nose and suffer through the first 35 percent of the book. Until Bosch and Rachel Walling meet the book reads as two different stories. It doesn't help matters that Connelly chose to write Bosch in first person and Rachel and The Poet in third person. Why do authors do this??? Just pick one style or the other, doing both in the same book is aggravating.

I have read about all of the Harry Bosch books, but purposely skipped over ones like this since I just didn't feel like reading about different characters. Based on others comments, I should probably have read Connelly's "The Poet" first, but eh, I don't think I'm missing much.

Harry is Harry in this one. A bit adrift since retiring from the LAPD. He is trying to get to know his daughter Maddie better and travels back and forth to Las Vegas to visit her, and his ex Eleanor Wish. When Harry is asked a special favor from an old friend's widow (we'll get to that below) he decides to investigate whether former FBI agent Terry McCaleb was murdered and if he was, why. 

So Bosch looks into that why we go back and forth between his investigation and Rachel Walling being pulled from no man's land to see if she can give some insight into a series of murders that have been uncovered in the desert near Las Vegas. 

I have to say that Connelly really missed a chance to show that he can write from a woman's POV. The third person POV for Rachel really doesn't give us a chance to get inside her head. 

Also I wish that Connelly had given us a chance to get a POV or prologue from McCaleb. It seemed that Connelly was dissatisfied with the character and didn't know what to do with him. His life seemed sad and I recall not caring for his wife in the last one. All this book was provide a litany of complaints from fictional characters about how they were portrayed in the movie that was made about "Blood Work". Also did Connelly forget that Bosch and McCaleb had a falling out in the prior book with these two? Rightfully so I may add. Bosch acting like they were really good friends and getting angry about someone murdering McCaleb didn't even feel real. Hey remember when Bosch's partner was shot and killed and he acted like it was no big thing? Yeah. So this whole track down and avenge McCaleb was a bit of a reach for me.

I ready said how the changing POVs messed up the reading for me, so no need to go through that again. The book was slow and boring to start with too. It picks up when the cases converge. And by that point Connelly does away from shifting from Bosch too much and the book improves dramatically. I loved the twists of this case and getting into what causes The Poet to seek out a type of man and murder him.

The changing nature of the FBI post 9/11 was interesting to see too. And there's a curve thrown at us at the end that provides the answers to lingering questions about Terry. It would have been interesting to see what see Connelly could do with this character. Instead the characters from his series all seemed to suck so good riddance to them.

The ending leaves Bosch on a new path and alone again.